Product Behavior

A few years ago, I went out into the world to ask people about the stuff in their kitchens. At one point, sorting through a drawer of silverware, one interviewee came out with two soup spoons, with blue-and-yellow-polka-dotted handles. “I love these spoons. I got them in France and I love them.” Then she moved on to something else.

When we buy something, what are we buying? Are we having an experience? Acquiring someone else’s experience?

I bought a digital SLR about a year ago, and I love it. My previous SLR was an early 80’s Nikon, so buying the DSLR meant getting not only the ability to take several hundred pictures without needing to change the film, but auto-focus and stuff like that. I already have a pocket-sized digital camera for everyday snapshots, but I use the SLR for “real” pictures - portraits of kids, arty expression, etc. It’s great. But something happened when cameras when digital: they became computers. My camera is a low-end model, and although I love it, I’m feeling a little jealous that it was superseded this week by a new model.

When we work for appliance manufactures, we often run into the issue of The Big Box, and, especially, Shelf Space. A Shelf-Space project is only indirectly about providing the consumer with a great product; the main point is to get as many products on the shelf as possible.

It’s certainly entertaining to watch the press do backflips to explain how they could have been just so wrong about the New Hampshire primaries. Did they ask the wrong people? Apply the wrong statistical model? Misread what the public really wants? Or did they run into what every marketing manager knows, or should know: that asking people what they are going to do is not a good predictor of what they’ll actually do.

I had dinner the other night with a friend who is in charge of prepared foods for a local supermarket. He’s a professional chef and worked for years in restaurants, and I asked him if doing prepared foods was much different. He made an interesting comment that got me thinking about products and how we present them vs. how people use them.